Al Jazeera “Dining with Terrorists” screens in NZ

Media Release: February 19 2009

Al Jazeera’s six-part series “Dining with Terrorists” screens in NZ

News about a New Zealander being arrested in Pakistan this month suggested he was in the Taleban and al Qaeda stronghold region to make contact with terrorists.

Mark Taylor, 35, has not been able to seen by New Zealand authorities yet, but further reports suggest he may be a journalist. If that proves to be correct, he will not be the first journalist to attempt to “get inside” and learn about what motivates “terrorists”.

New Zealand TV channels Stratos and Triangle screen from tomorrow (Friday February 20) “Dining with Terrorists”, a six-part series that sees author and journalist Phil Rees travel to South Asia, the Middle East and the Americas to meet – and even eat with – men and women accused by others of terrorism and to try and understand their point of view.

Rees meets Basque separatists, Serb nationalists and their Kosovar Albanian foes, Colombian coca farmers, Irish Republicans and Tamil Tigers as he seeks to discover what motivates those who commit terrible violence.
In the first of the series he asks if the old adage that one man's terrorist is another's freedom fighter still applies.

“Dining With Terrorists” is served up via Stratos and Triangle’s link with Al Jazeera TV, and as a result screens at a variety of times that may encourage some to record it for later viewing. Screening times can be found on www.stratostv.co.nz or www.tritv.co.nz. NZ’s Triangle is the only free-to-air TV channel in the world to broadcast Al Jazeera English.

Rees graduated from Oxford in 1982 and started his career at the BBC. He has won numerous international awards for coverage and documentaries of conflict throughout the world and he now writes and reports for a variety of international organisations.

This TV series comes from his book “Dining With Terrorists” published in 2005. It was lauded by the critics and recommended by the British Journalism Review as “compulsory reading for every editor, journalist and politician – before it is too late."

ENDS

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